A thousand deaths by Jack London

hour, off and on, had been watching it grow. The sailor had

evidently repaired damages and was making up for lost time.

“Look at him come!”

Both passengers stopped chopping ice to watch. Twenty miles of

Bennett were behind them–room and to spare for the sea to toss up

its mountains toward the sky. Sinking and soaring like a storm-

god, the sailor drove by them. The huge sail seemed to grip the

boat from the crests of the waves, to tear it bodily out of the

water, and fling it crashing and smothering down into the yawning

troughs.

“The sea’ll never catch him!”

“But he’ll r-r-run her nose under!”

Even as they spoke, the black tarpaulin swooped from sight behind a

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51

big comber. The next wave rolled over the spot, and the next, but

the boat did not reappear. The Alma rushed by the place. A little

riffraff of oats and boxes was seen. An arm thrust up and a shaggy

head broke surface a score of yards away.

For a time there was silence. As the end of the lake came in

sight, the waves began to leap aboard with such steady recurrence

that the correspondents no longer chopped ice but flung the water

out with buckets. Even this would not do, and, after a shouted

conference with Rasmunsen, they attacked the baggage. Flour,

bacon, beans, blankets, cooking-stove, ropes, odds and ends,

everything they could get hands on, flew overboard. The boat

acknowledged it at once, taking less water and rising more

buoyantly.

“That’ll do!” Rasmunsen called sternly, as they applied themselves

to the top layer of eggs.

“The h-hell it will!” answered the shivering one, savagely. With

the exception of their notes, films, and cameras, they had

sacrificed their outfit. He bent over, laid hold of an egg-box,

and began to worry it out from under the lashing.

“Drop it! Drop it, I say!”

Rasmunsen had managed to draw his revolver, and with the crook of

his arm over the sweep head, was taking aim. The correspondent

stood up on the thwart, balancing back and forth, his face twisted

with menace and speechless anger.

“My God!”

So cried his brother correspondent, hurling himself, face downward,

into the bottom of the boat. The Alma, under the divided attention

of Rasmunsen, had been caught by a great mass of water and whirled

around. The after leach hollowed, the sail emptied and jibed, and

the boom, sweeping with terrific force across the boat, carried the

angry correspondent overboard with a broken back. Mast and sail

had gone over the side as well. A drenching sea followed, as the

boat lost headway, and Rasmunsen sprang to the bailing bucket

Several boats hurtled past them in the next half-hour,–small

boats, boats of their own size, boats afraid, unable to do aught

but run madly on. Then a ten-ton barge, at imminent risk of

destruction, lowered sail to windward and lumbered down upon them.

“Keep off! Keep off!” Rasmunsen screamed.

But his low gunwale ground against the heavy craft, and the

remaining correspondent clambered aboard. Rasmunsen was over the

eggs like a cat and in the bow of the Alma, striving with numb

fingers to bend the hauling-lines together.

“Come on!” a red-whiskered man yelled at him.

“I’ve a thousand dozen eggs here,” he shouted back. “Gimme a tow!

I’ll pay you!”

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52

“Come on!” they howled in chorus.

A big whitecap broke just beyond, washing over the barge and

leaving the Alma half swamped. The men cast off, cursing him as

they ran up their sail. Rasmunsen cursed back and fell to bailing.

The mast and sail, like a sea anchor, still fast by the halyards,

held the boat head on to wind and sea and gave him a chance to

fight the water out.

Three hours later, numbed, exhausted, blathering like a lunatic,

but still bailing, he went ashore on an ice-strewn beach near

Cariboo Crossing. Two men, a government courier and a half-breed

voyageur, dragged him out of the surf, saved his cargo, and beached

the Alma. They were paddling out of the country in a Peterborough,

and gave him shelter for the night in their storm-bound camp. Next

morning they departed, but he elected to stay by his eggs. And

thereafter the name and fame of the man with the thousand dozen

eggs began to spread through the land. Gold-seekers who made in

before the freeze-up carried the news of his coming. Grizzled old-

timers of Forty Mile and Circle City, sour doughs with leathern

jaws and bean-calloused stomachs, called up dream memories of

chickens and green things at mention of his name. Dyea and Skaguay

took an interest in his being, and questioned his progress from

every man who came over the passes, while Dawson–golden,

omeletless Dawson–fretted and worried, and way-laid every chance

arrival for word of him.

But of this Rasmunsen knew nothing. The day after the wreck he

patched up the Alma and pulled out. A cruel east wind blew in his

teeth from Tagish, but he got the oars over the side and bucked

manfully into it, though half the time he was drifting backward and

chopping ice from the blades. According to the custom of the

country, he was driven ashore at Windy Arm; three times on Tagish

saw him swamped and beached; and Lake Marsh held him at the freeze-

up. The Alma was crushed in the jamming of the floes, but the eggs

were intact. These he back-tripped two miles across the ice to the

shore, where he built a cache, which stood for years after and was

pointed out by men who knew.

Half a thousand frozen miles stretched between him and Dawson, and

the waterway was closed. But Rasmunsen, with a peculiar tense look

in his face, struck back up the lakes on foot. What he suffered on

that lone trip, with nought but a single blanket, an axe, and a

handful of beans, is not given to ordinary mortals to know. Only

the Arctic adventurer may understand. Suffice that he was caught

in a blizzard on Chilkoot and left two of his toes with the surgeon

at Sheep Camp. Yet he stood on his feet and washed dishes in the

scullery of the PAWONA to the Puget Sound, and from there passed

coal on a P. S. boat to San Francisco.

It was a haggard, unkempt man who limped across the shining office

floor to raise a second mortgage from the bank people. His hollow

cheeks betrayed themselves through the scraggy beard, and his eyes

seemed to have retired into deep caverns where they burned with

cold fires. His hands were grained from exposure and hard work,

and the nails were rimmed with tight-packed dirt and coal-dust. He

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53

spoke vaguely of eggs and ice-packs, winds and tides; but when they

declined to let him have more than a second thousand, his talk

became incoherent, concerning itself chiefly with the price of dogs

and dog-food, and such things as snowshoes and moccasins and winter

trails. They let him have fifteen hundred, which was more than the

cottage warranted, and breathed easier when he scrawled his

signature and passed out the door.

Two weeks later he went over Chilkoot with three dog sleds of five

dogs each. One team he drove, the two Indians with him driving the

others. At Lake Marsh they broke out the cache and loaded up. But

there was no trail. He was the first in over the ice, and to him

fell the task of packing the snow and hammering away through the

rough river jams. Behind him he often observed a camp-fire smoke

trickling thinly up through the quiet air, and he wondered why the

people did not overtake him. For he was a stranger to the land and

did not understand. Nor could he understand his Indians when they

tried to explain. This they conceived to be a hardship, but when

they balked and refused to break camp of mornings, he drove them to

their work at pistol point.

When he slipped through an ice bridge near the White Horse and

froze his foot, tender yet and oversensitive from the previous

freezing, the Indians looked for him to lie up. But he sacrificed

a blanket, and, with his foot incased in an enormous moccasin, big

as a water-bucket, continued to take his regular turn with the

front sled. Here was the cruellest work, and they respected him,

though on the side they rapped their foreheads with their knuckles

and significantly shook their heads. One night they tried to run

away, but the zip-zip of his bullets in the snow brought them back,

snarling but convinced. Whereupon, being only savage Chilkat men,

they put their heads together to kill him; but he slept like a cat,

and, waking or sleeping, the chance never came. Often they tried

to tell him the import of the smoke wreath in the rear, but he